Mayor Durkan has given three State of the City addresses during her tenure leading Washington's largest city. I reread all three of them today. The one phrase her administration really you to associate with them: "city of the future".

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2018:"We have a lot of work to do. Are we up to the task of building this safer, more just, more inclusive city of the future? Absolutely.""Seizing the awesome opportunities we have to build a more vibrant City for the future.[We've] always been that City that invents the future.

2019: "Building a City of the Future" is an actual subhead on the speech. "Our City of the future must have welcoming public spaces connected with world-class transportation options."
"I know that together, together, we will keep building that city of the future."

2020: "We are that city that invents the future."
"We will show we believe in this future. And together we can act and make progress."

The people who have watched this administration act know that its rhetoric and its actions are strongly in conflict, from police accountability to transportation to transparency. That doesn't need rehashing here.

But what strikes me here during these past weeks is just how much the COVID-19 response proves that our current administration doesn't even know what a city of the future looks like.

Seattle is one of the cities in the country that prides itself on its response to climate change. But our inability to adapt quickly to a crisis that isn't going anywhere anytime soon should show us how flat-footed we are going to be in response to real coming climate impacts.

Seattle has seen its traffic volumes drop by 60%, according to its own DOT. The adaptive response to this *fundamental* shift in one of our largest built assets?

Removing parking restrictions (one by one, after weeks) and adding some vehicle loading zones.

Seattle has a larger homeless population per-capita than Los Angeles. Its response to helping them through this crisis has been to shutter a large portion of the public restrooms, add SIX handwashing stations across the entire city, and slowly add back lost shelter capacity.

It's pretty clear the long-term takeaway from COVID at this point for Seattle is: we acted fast and saved lives. That's true. Leadership from city to state was adroit at managing the immediate crisis. But the city (and state) of the future requires that we then adapt. When?

I'm probably not going to stop sharing photos of other cities adapting better than we are, but it's pretty clear that we don't currently live in the city of the future.